Weaponized Empathy has long been a topic of discussion here. Today, let’s break down a very common use of it in private circles, in debates between regular folks on social media.

The tactic looks something like this:

Conservative: I believe in [insert policy here].Progressive: Here is a sad story about someone (or even a hypothetical someone) who would be affected by the policy. Do you want this person to suffer?Conservative: Well, no, of course not…Progressive: Well then, you shouldn’t believe in [the policy]. It’s immoral.

This is an exceptionally low bar to clear for the Progressive. No matter what political positions a person might have, at least some people, somewhere, can be found who would be negatively affected by it. If, for instance, the tax code were simplified, the poor IRS agents auditing people with a microscope for violations of their arcane system might lose their jobs. Or, perhaps some poor person somewhere might end up with slightly less from the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Clearly the Conservative then wants poor people to starve, and IRS agents to be unable to feed their families. This is, of course, a rather blatant example, but read on for a more subtle and more powerful version of the argument.

Once a negative example is trotted out, the Progressive declares moral superiority and thus victory in the debate. Clearly he is more moral, because he wants to make sure nobody slips between the cracks, and everyone gets their fair share of… whatever.

A classic example can be found in this debate with Ron Paul, wherein the liberal moderator trots out a hypothetical person who has “a good job” but somehow has no money, decides not to buy a healthcare plan, has no existing government aid, can obtain no charitable aid, and possesses no friends willing to help him, and is experiencing an expensive health problem. What would happen, asks the liberal?

The absurdly unlikely (but theoretically possible) scenario is thus implied to be proof that we need government-managed universal healthcare.

Conservatives need to stop accepting this low bar as evidence of anything. Time after time, I’ve witnessed Conservatives argue these types of absurd positions by positing equally unlikely ways the free market or charity will cater to all such edge cases. Once dragged down to this position, victory is impossible. The best debaters may score a draw, edge case vs. edge case. Everyone else will lose, and the Progressive will trumpet his moral superiority over the evil, greedy Republican Uber-Nazis until he is blue in the face.

Ron Paul, being a very smart man and a doctor himself, argued this thing to a draw. I doubt many others could have pulled this off.

This is the wrong way to argue the point. It is, in fact, tacitly accepting that the Progressive’s position that the edge case means anything about national policy in the first place. Progressive policies, even if they are theoretically universal in scope, will also be subject to edge cases, as the Charlie Gard incident demonstrated. In fact, one essential truth about government micromanagement is that it is likely to result in more such edge cases, not less. Bureaucracies aren’t known for their intellectual flexibility. More people will fail to get the care they need, not less.

But even that isn’t quite the right way to argue the point. Leftism is demanding a sort of universalism that simply isn’t possible in any human institution. And, invariably, when the institution falls short of universal perfection, it is excoriated by the Left and used as justification for giving them (as in the Progressives themselves) more power under the excuse that they are morally superior. It is nothing more than a blatant power grab, thinly disguised as a moral argument.

This must be challenged immediately in any debate with them that goes down the edge case path. “Are you demanding perfection? That every single person receive 100% of all needed care? If so, you are a lunatic. Hard cases make bad law.”

This moves the bar up a notch. Now the Progressive must demonstrate that his system is better at a meta level, not just an individual hard case level. Weaponized Empathy can still be deployed at higher levels, but this is generally much more difficult, especially given the fact that Socialism generally produces very poor results when taken as a whole. However, expect the next rung on the Progressive argument ladder to be something along the lines of “well, Nordic Socialism is just great.”

Like this:

Lately, the political world has narrowed. It has become small. When the shooting happened at Pulse, in Orlando, I saw folks I knew distraught over the affair. I knew people who lost friends there. I’ve DJed in that area many times. It was too close for comfort. It is one thing when such violence is far away, and quite another when you realize how near to you the lightning struck.

Because of ongoing legal matters, I cannot tell all of the details. What I can say is this: Louis acted in defense of himself and his family.

He brought his Trump “Make America Great Again” hat with him on his vacation to our nation’s capital. Louis has been a strong supporter of Trump from day one. In this, we sometimes disagreed, on occasion, as my support for Trump was somewhat more grudging and less enthusiastic. But nonetheless, he wanted to support our President on his trip to DC, and I can’t blame him for that. While in a restaurant with his wife and two daughters, he was heckled by three men over his hat. There were threats made in front his family. I won’t repeat them here, but note that they were targeted at his wife and daughters as much as at him.

Louis tried to leave the restaurant, not wanting to deal with that sort of thing while on vacation, but while waiting for an Uber ride to pick him and his family up, the three came outside and continued with their heckling and threats. And then one of the men struck him.

Suffice it to say, once they turned the situation physical, it did not go so well for them. 3 on 1, and they got their asses handed to them.

DC Police, of course, sided with the Leftists immediately. After all, it’s not exactly a bastion of Trump support. They tried to charge him with a hate crime, despite the fact that it was the anti-Trumpers who kept following him (this much has already been proven from cameras inside the restaurant), and it was them who struck first. Fortunately, it appears that his lawyer got the hate crime charge struck down, at least. But Louis’ defense will be expensive, and victory is not at all assured, unless camera footage from outside the restaurant can be found covering the incident. The punishment is the process, and he’s suffering it now.

Our political world is narrowing. Or, at least it sure feels that way to me. Used to be I didn’t know anyone who had been through political violence like this. Now, it’s becoming routine. Not to mention Antifa has been calling Louis and his wife continuing with various threats, and trying to post bad reviews of his business. Standard operating procedure for them, I suppose. Our block is ready for them, of course, should they try anything particularly stupid.

But, being cowards who only attack with 3 to 1 superiority (and still lose), I doubt we have much to worry about. Until the next such incident, anyway. Next time it could be you, dear reader, or even me.

Like this:

Taking responsibility is part of being a man. It’s an age old axiom. When a man fails, when he screws up, it behooves him to admit his failure and to endeavor to repair it, if he is able.

But no man is responsible for another. To steal a concept from Francis, if Jones commits a crime, and Smith does not, how can Smith be held responsible, even in part, for the crime of Jones?

Yet generalities exist to muddy the waters for us. Islam has proven itself to be more militant and prone to terrorism than any other modern religion (unless we were to call Marxism a religion). Islam has always had bloody borders, and the religion has changed little since the seventh century. Clear answers to questions like these are often difficult, and can lead to excessive moralizing.

Excessive moralizing is one of the greatest sins of our age, for Smith is made to question his own culpability in the crimes of Jones. If both Smith and Jones share a skin tone, and Jones has done some evil deed, what is Smith’s share in the deed? What if Smith tried his best to stop Jones from committing his crime?

Today, having white skin often means being held as somehow generally responsible for the ills of Indians, Black folks, the sufferings of the Jews, and so on. Yet, like Smith, most of us have not done these things, nor would countenance them. Additionally, many of our ancestors fought to prevent such things. If you account men who fought the Nazis among your ancestors, how could the deeds of the Nazis be weighed against you?

Social Justice Warriors, of course, do not care. You are white, thus the crimes of Jones fall upon you, and you are advised that you must take responsibility for them. You must pay the weregild, you must give up your success and step aside, you must bear Jones’s punishment too. Some fools even suggest that reading to your own children is unfair to other children, for it gives them a leg up in the world.

Such punishments can include your own death, and that of your entire civilization. It is not difficult to find SJWs musing on the utopian world that would come to pass should white Christian males be made extinct. Indeed, Huffington Post publishes columnists who argue that they should be deprived of the vote, so that it may be made easier to “redistribute” their wealth (oddly enough, this was a hoax, and HuffPo fell for it – wishful thinking, perhaps?). #KillAllMen, of course, is also acceptable and amenable to the SJW authorities.

If you dare to complain, you are tarred as racist scum. Carry the burden of another man’s sin, in addition to your own. Suffer the punishments for another man’s mistakes, in addition to your own. You are supposed to check your privilege every moment of every day. When a progressive feminist speaks, you are to be silent and listen. Good allies should be seen, and not heard. They are not shy about this, as the aforementioned article explains:

As McKenzie puts it, “Shut up and listen.”

As someone striving to be an ally, the most important thing we can do is listen to as many voices of those we’re allying ourselves with as possible…

…Sure, your privilege may afford you the spotlight sometimes, and there are times when you can use that spotlight to talk to people who share your identity (see #8), but whenever possible, allies turn that spotlight away from themselves and to the voices that are so often marginalized and ignored.

Being a supposed ally means nothing to them. It neither alleviates your guilt, nor mitigates the punishments due to you for the supposed crimes of Jones. Being a proper progressive doesn’t mean you won’t get stabbed on a train for being a chump.

Talk to a Leftist, and he will complain that dead people who looked vaguely similar to you perpetrated horrific crimes against humanity (while ignoring similar crimes perpetuated by people who didn’t look much like you). The Trail of Tears was your fault, so was slavery, the Holocaust, colonialism, why Somalia sucks today, and why it sucked 500 years ago, and why an overweight lesbian couldn’t get a taxi cab in Manhattan at 4 in the afternoon on a Friday – whatever. It’s all your fault. Carry the sins, accept the punishment, give up your wealth (there was a hashtag running around social media some time ago called #GiveYourMoneyToWomen), shut up and stay in your lane.

Christ could carry the weight of the world, the plethora of sins committed by mankind. I, however, am unable to do so. I’m just a man, a regular Joe. I work, I pay my taxes (I’d rather not, but it’s not like the IRS gives us a choice in the matter), I have a family, same as any other. I screw up a lot, and the weight of my own responsibilities is, on occasion, rather crushing on its own. I am not Atlas, and SJWs can sit there and try to put the weight of the world on my shoulders, but it’ll never work. It’ll never do any good.

Folks, I don’t know how much of your thinking has been wasted on the matter of social justice and progressivism. A good man might ask himself if, perhaps, he really ought to carry these chains, if you are Jacob Marley to their Ebenezer Scrooge. But the question is moot to begin with. You can’t carry these chains, whether you wanted to or not. They are too big for you. They will destroy you. When you look into the face of an SJW, you are seeing someone who was already destroyed by this weight. Their psyches cracked under the pressure. They are no longer sane, or even themselves. It is almost like they are all possessed.

This man is broken. The woman next to him is damaged, also.

You see this sort of smug, superior grin in the face of an SJW. But behind it is utter madness. These are broken people, whose actions are no longer rational in any sense. Some can only gain satisfaction from submission, from emotional and intellectual (and sometimes physical) masochism and self-flagellation. Some can’t even gain it from that, anymore. Some have surrendered completely to animus possession. These people are no longer free-thinking individuals, capable of making decisions. They are, rather, individuals who have completely lost touch with reality. Unable to cope with the weight of the world, they seek to unload it on others. It’s your fault, not theirs. Nothing is their fault, they are perfect, you are to blame for everything.

Animus Possession gone completely off the rails. This woman hates you for existing. Everything bad in the world is your fault, because you exist.

Underneath it all, of course, they hate themselves. This has given rise to people who say things like “I won’t have children, because they would be white.” Or other folks, like Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King, who desperately wish to be black, perhaps because they could escape the weight of the world by identifying with the oppressed instead of the oppressor.

Weaponized Empathy has destroyed these people, body and soul. They mutilate themselves, hate themselves, rail against the very society that created them, and then seek to unload their shame and self-loathing on to others. Look at this before-and-after comparison of the woman who was punched in the face, while trying to hit Trump supporters with a wine bottle:

This woman made a mess of herself.

This is what happens to people who try to carry more mental weight than they can handle. A man who does this will be destroyed utterly. It causes you to question your worth as an individual, and once you have deemed yourself worthless, it is easy to do as these people have done. Now it doesn’t matter if you degrade yourself, objectify yourself, attack people, and destroy lives.

Nothing else matters except some short-term pleasure, just a bit of petty satisfaction at attacking an easy target. And then the target decides to fight back, depriving you of even that pleasure.

In some way, I pity the SJWs.

I’m going to be very real with you for a moment, and take off my hat has a blogger, an author, and whatever else I may be, and just speak to you as a man.

This could have been me.

Does that surprise you? There was a time I skirted so close to falling under this spell, it would shock you. I felt the guilt, the social pressure, the desire for conformity. Despite the terrible weight such ideology carries on the mind, it is absurdly easy to fall into it. Every day we are assaulted by the agitprop. It is so easy to just say “yes, it’s all my fault, I will submit and obey.”

It will bring momentary relief, because you will no longer have to fight a narrative that is bombarded upon you 24 hours a day. That mental effort is, itself, rather exhausting on the mind. But if you accept the chains, that is a far greater weight, one that will destroy you. The chains are seductive. They call, because of the enormous weight of social power behind them.

The pressure is both great and subtle. Imagine a conversation about the weather, innocent enough on its own. A friend might say “wow, that global warming sure is kicking in today!” You’ve a few choices here. You can challenge him, but the immediate counter is likely to be something like “well, 99% of scientists agree, sooooo….” The implication, of course, is that you are stupid for disagreeing with 99% of scientists (whether or not there is any truth to that claim, either). You could remain silent because it’s easier. Or you could just give in, regardless of the truth of the matter, because it’s easiest. Meanwhile, if you counter your friend successfully, you may be down a friend by the end of the night.

So whether or not a lot of folks believe this thing, soon consensus is reached, as much to peer pressure as anything else. Then it is, further, easier to agree on welfare, tax policy, affirmative action, black lives matter, social justice, etc… Each one has a superficial rhetorical argument which sounds nice, and which has enormous media programming and social pressure behind it.

A thousand such chats happen every day, both in the real world, and the social media world. The sum total of which is designed to move you, via peer pressure and Weaponized Empathy, toward self-hatred, and intense personal guilt for things which you neither did, nor were capable of preventing.

Soon a man might find himself agreeing with lunatic propositions that all Republicans are literal Nazis, and Donald Trump is worse than Hitler because… well, nobody really knows the reasons.

Submission is always the easier short-term choice. Long-term, however, it just destroys a man’s soul. Sooner or later he’s just a meat puppet. And who might he be a meat puppet for? Who pulls his strings?

Here’s one:

Tom Kratman’s Class Ones, self-centered and semi-incompetent oligarchs, run the show. They are the ultimate beneficiaries of all this. The Clintons and other corrupt political dynasties. A handful of Leftist executives and corporate cronies are also among them. Celebrities, media talking heads, etc…

They talk out of their asses, and wrap themselves up in flags, but they believe in nothing. You think Chelsea Clinton gives a fig about a black thug shot by a cop? You think she cares about the plight of an illegal Mexican family, crossing into the country?

No. Deep down, I doubt even the SJWs really believe this. But it doesn’t matter. They have been destroyed by the weight of the world, conveniently offloaded by politicians and leaders around the world onto hapless people who are incapable of carrying such moral weight. It’s never a Clinton’s fault, after all.

Look, I’m fond of saying that I’m just a regular guy. And there’s a reason for that. There are some very strong-willed, intelligent people out there who can resist this agitprop and social pressure without much effort. For some, it is easy to shrug it off and pay no mind to it. But that’s not most folks. Marxists are great psychological manipulators. It is their one great talent, and it is enough that it nearly makes up for all their other intellectual shortcomings, which are legion. Most folks are vulnerable, at some level.

And resisting psychological manipulation is not easy for most people. It’s not enough to just say “don’t be brainwashed.” Folks need to know how the brainwashing works, how it can be identified and resisted, how you can avoid going down the path that leads to people who can’t even figure out what gender they want to be, or what ethnicity they are, or what pronoun they feel like using today. These are people who can’t even say “hey man, how’s it going” without being triggered. They are constantly on the look out for the most minor of violations against the political narrative, their entire mind, body, and soul hijacked to serve political figures who care nothing for them (indeed, who probably laugh at their gullibility behind closed doors).

You owe them nothing. You aren’t responsible for the crimes of the world, except those in which you have directly and willingly participated. Anyone, and I do mean anyonewho says otherwise is attempting to manipulate you, and place chains upon you. It is, often times, difficult to resist the allure of just giving up the fight. It’s so much easier to throw in the towel, and jump when someone else tells you to. When damn near everyone accuses you of something, to just say “yes, I’m guilty.”

But you can’t. I can’t. And even if I could make such a choice for myself, I cannot make it for my family, for my country, for my civilization.

You are not Atlas, and you do not need to suffer his punishment. You are not Christ, and you will never be morally perfect, and can never carry the weight of another’s sins (you will have enough trouble with your own).

Like this:

The esteemed Sarah Hoyt has written a great followup to Marxism: the Bug Wearing an Edgar Suit. As we know, the Left infiltrates institutions, guts them, and wears the skin of the destroyed institution, demanding the respect once due to the original. They then use this to destroy individuals who do not cooperate with the politically correct narrative. Marxists may be terrible economists, and inverted moralists, but they are quite good at playing political games. It may be the only real talent they have.

Unfortunately that talent is generally sufficient to launch them to the fore.

Sarah explains for us:

There was a time — listen to me, children — when the left had the power to utterly destroy anyone they chose to.

They would descend in a swarm, find some little thing you had said, take it out of context, then pound you with it until you no longer had a job, a marriage, any friends willing to admit to knowing you.

Actually it wasn’t even required that they take something you said and take it out of context. They controlled all the gate keeping positions and a whisper campaign could go out — the equivalent of having your papers stamped PU for Politically Unreliable — and depending on how much money they could make off you, you’d either be turned out without references (so to put it) or, in my field, be kept in midlist durance vile. (In other fields there are equivalents, where you do all the work, but never get anywhere with money, let alone power.)

This is partly how they GOT all the gatekeeping positions, and kept them, or in other words, how they gutted all the important institutions of our culture and then wore the institutions’ skin, demanding respect.

Most of us on the Right have dealt with this. The options were generally to hide your political views, and stuff yourself into the Conservative closet, or to suffer significant penalties to your career, your social life, and your income. The Left made Conservatism expensive in terms of social capital. However, as Sarah tells us, the Left had to spend vast amounts of capital themselves in order to achieve this. They had to take over academia, the media, entertainment, and infiltrate pretty much every sizable institution in the country. In simple terms, they needed a monopoly.

Because if a Right-winger had the ability to leave the places where the Left held sway, he could no longer be silenced.

The Edgar suit has been slipping away for quite some time now. In 2016, the media’s skin suit slipped off entirely. Their hatred of Trump was so great, and their love of Hillary so complete, that the skin suit cracked and fell apart. Everyone knows the media is partisan now. The fiction of an unbiased, impartial purveyor of news has fallen away forever. And here’s the kicker: all of this vast expenditure of social capital was insufficient to topple Donald Trump’s campaign. They put all their chips into the pot, and still couldn’t buy victory.

They continue to attack Rightists this way, and they enjoyed some success with Milo (though he avoided complete defeat, too), but increasingly, they require cooperation from the Right itself in order to destroy enemies. Treacherous, dishonest blowhards like Evan McMullin are solicited by the Left for cooperative action, because the Left lacks the ability to win these battles alone any longer.

And even that was insufficient to totally destroy their chosen target. They did some damage, but Milo was left standing.

Even if a Rightist may lose such a conflict, it behooves us to fight to the end, tooth-and-nail, because even a Leftist victory is Pyrrhic for them, now. Force them to spend ever-more absurd amounts of money and social capital. Bankrupt them on the social stage. Make victory so utterly expensive that even they are afraid to pay the price.

It’s like punching a bully in the nose. You may win the resulting fight, or you may lose, but rest assured, the bully will now have to add this to his mental calculus: if I attack this man, he’ll punch me in the face.

And, increasingly, we are winning these engagements, because the accumulated respect due to original institutions is fading. The skin suit is rotting. Edgar’s carcass is slipping away, revealing the alien cockroach festering underneath the maggot-infested sack of meat.

Every time the left pulls that lever for the outrage machine, they’re spending capital. Every time they start a witch hunt, the skin suit slips a little and the respect we owed the gutted institution is lost.

It won’t be long till our only reaction to outrageous accusations is what it already is in Science Fiction outside their circles: point and make duck noises.

Sarah makes an excellent point here. Someday these fights won’t even be serious any longer. We will laugh at them. They will be outside, looking in. But make no mistake, even then we must remain vigilant. The Marxist is always looking for his way in, and the Marxist will always be with us. Its overly-simplistic moral relativism will always appeal to some, and will always be manipulated by those seeking it as a path to personal power. Call it whatever you will, but even the ancient Greeks understood it well enough:

Remember your Aristophanes:

Praxagora: I want all to have a share of everything and all property to be in common; there will no longer be either rich or poor; […] I shall begin by making land, money, everything that is private property, common to all. […]

The story is pretty simple, a British father who lost his wife to cancer years before took his 13 year old daughter on a short little vacation. He booked a room at the Travelodge, and went to check in, and the only type of room they had left was a double room, so he said he’d take it…

…then a whole dramatic escapade ensues where the Travelodge manager interrogates the customer, calls the police, and accuses the father of being a pedo. Police take the child away from her father, and interrogate her as to whether not he is her father.

It’s absurd that a meddling hotel manager would do this, of course, but at the same time consider the blindness the British authorities had toward the Rotherham rape cases. If the supposed perp is a Muslim or non-white, the practice is largely ignored out of fear that the authorities will be tarred as racist. If a British man takes his daughter on a vacation, he is subjected to ludicrous accusations with absolutely no evidence whatsoever behind them. Then both father and daughter are interrogated by the police.

This is rather like the absurdity of old grandmothers being subjected to random deep TSA screenings.

I’ve taken to calling this phenomenon Reverse Profiling, insofar as whatever the common sense profiling might suggest, the authorities must do the exact opposite. If, for instance, purple Martians were known to be more likely to commit random acts of terrorism, those same purple Martians must be let in without any screening whatsoever. And if old grandmothers were known to rarely, if ever, commit said acts, the book must be thrown at as many of them as possible.

The hotel chain, meanwhile, crafts lies to try and justify their actions:

Mr Darwell complained and says that the company are now falsely claiming that he tried to pay by cash in order to justify their suspicion.

‘They say I insisted on paying cash when I arrived but its rubbish. I had already paid by credit card before I even arrived,’ he added.

The increasing involvement of companies in policing and politics is starting to become quite worrisome to me. They are becoming a cog in demands of the State. And meanwhile, SJWs make demands that companies embrace political correctness, that is to say Leftism. We like in a bizarre world wherein Capitalism is, itself, being bent to the will of Leftism. It’s beyond crony Capitalism and into some kind of bizarre hybrid not entirely dissimilar from Chinese Market Communism, or whatever they are calling their system these days.

‘Our colleagues are trained based on current national guidelines from the NSPCC, the police and other agencies and in the past, hotel team actions have led to successful intervention to protect young people.

The government said to jump… and even in a blatant case of obvious misjudgment, they jumped. A decree comes down from on high that hotels should do (x), no matter how ridiculous or stupid it may be, and off they go.

I bet dollars to donuts that the hotel manager wouldn’t have said a damn thing if the father had been a Pakistani and his daughter had been in a burkha. And just who do you think the odds favor in cases of kiddy diddling? After all, Mohammed himself was okay with the practice, so long as they were older than 9.

Imagine, even, that the father had been, instead, a mother. Feminists would have crawled out of the woodwork to make this an instance of sexism, and proof of the evil Patriarchy. But they’ll be silent for this. No outrage, because deep down, most of them would probably think the man deserved it because he was male.

But let’s be honest, if it were a mother and her child, nobody would have batted an eyelash anyway. Only white men are evil, after all, didntcha know?

It ties in neatly with another piece I read this morning from the esteemed Daniel Greenfield: THE CIVIL WAR IS HERE.

For some time now, Leftists in California have made mouth noises about secession, though nothing has come out of that (nor do I expect it to). The reason is that Progressivism doesn’t desire peaceful coexistence. Progressives are unable to share power. Indeed, they are unable to share anything.

The notion that some folks of like mind might get together and form a country of their own is anathema to these people. They suffer no equals where power is concerned. It is all or nothing with them.

If you asked the average Southerner on the street what he thinks of California leaving the Union, he’d probably say something along the lines of “good riddance, the sooner they go, the better.”

Nothing is stopping Progressives in America from moving to Canada, or the European Union, or any place, really, that is more Leftist than America. Yet they stay. Why?

Daniel Greenfield explains for us:

This civil war is very different than the last one. There are no cannons or cavalry charges. The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority. The left has rejected all forms of authority that it doesn’t control.

The Left wants to rule. It wants dominance across the entire world. They won’t leave the United States, nor secede their portion of the country from the rest, because they want absolute control over the entire Earth.

It’s about world domination, the old game of tyrants and would-be conquerors. It’s not about helping the poor, or the sick, or the disadvantaged. Just as World War I wasn’t about liberating the Serbs from Austria-Hungary.

It’s about defeating all opposing ideologies, and imposing a singular worldview on to every living human being. Naturally, the humans who fail to accept the program won’t be suffered to live.

Observer the glee Tom Kratman discovered in our enemy:

Another use is after the cops have drawn blood. Destruction of police vehicles via Molotov to the back seat and fuel intake is an effective way to escalate things. And watching police dance like a damned soul all aflame is still a beautiful thing.

Tom explains his own opinions on this man’s celebration of lighting people on fire:

“A beautiful thing” to burn someone alive, is it? I can see it being a necessary thing, in military terms, where necessary means little or nothing more than advantageous. But “beautiful” he says. And some people think it would be overreaction to shoot these people on sight. My ass.

Understand this clearly. To a Progressive of the Black Bloc persuasion, your violent, painful death is beautiful. Are you still concerned what they think of you? Does it still make you feel bad when one of these guys calls you a racist, or a sexist, or some other thing? They want to kill you.

Now, of course, the average garden-variety Leftist isn’t as overt as his Black Bloc ideological kin. And to be fair to him, he probably wouldn’t want to see you die, certainly not violently and painfully. But at the same time, he is willing to turn a blind eye to this violence, to make excuses for it, and to protect the guilty when they are caught.

But again, if he’s willing to allow this behavior, however tacitly and unofficially, does it matter what he thinks of you? Should you care about his opinion of you whatsoever?

Daniel Greenfield explains our choices:

The choices of this civil war are painfully clear.

We can have a system of government based around the Constitution with democratically elected representatives. Or we can have one based on the ideological principles of the left in which all laws and processes, including elections and the Constitution, are fig leaves for enforcing social justice.

But we cannot have both.

In other words, the options are to fight, or to embrace social justice in all particulars. Escape is no longer on the table. Secede isn’t on the table either. There is no where to run, and no legal recourse which the Left will respect.

The settling of our grievances has come to civil war. For now, the war is mostly a cold war, fought within the government itself, as Trump’s administration attracts the ire of almost every branch of the bureaucracy, media, and entertainment factions of the Progressive movement.

But don’t misunderstand, it is a war that could go hot at any moment. Best to be prepared.

If there is any optimism to be found here, you may see it in Tom Kratman’s piece, where he informs us that, in the end, our enemies may be making a serious error by pushing things this far. They have forgotten that wars are fought by human beings.

One is tempted to counter with, “What right have you, as an anarchist, to try to impose rules on my machine gun teams as they mow you down?” This whole section illustrates something I strongly advise the reader to look into in Lee Harris’ excellent book, Civilization and Its Enemies. The short version is that these people are, however dangerous, fundamentally unserious. They are not revolutionaries; they are unpublished and unpublishable playwrights, writing fantasy plays in their heads for themselves to star in, in which plays we lesser beings are reduced to the level of morally insignificant stage props.

They think of us as stage props, as their moral and intellectual inferiors, as dullards, rednecks, and uneducated hicks. They have more hubris than Napoleon taking on Russia. One suspects that their assault will fare just about as badly in the end. But either way, best to be ready for them nonetheless.